ACTUALITÉS ET ÉVÈNEMENTS

UltraTech: Cementing India’s Infrastructure

No matter where you live in the world, if you are near a city of any size you will see concrete. You see it in the sidewalks, foundations of everything from homes to massive skyscrapers and sometimes entire buildings.

Portland cement is the basic ingredient of concrete and making cement is the specialty of UltraTech Cement Limited in India. In fact, they are India’s largest manufacturer of cement and the eighth-largest cement company worldwide.

Cement is manufactured using a closely controlled chemical combination of calcium, silicon, aluminum, iron, and other ingredients such as fly ash. Fly ash is a by-product of a coal-fired power plant that is used to supplement cement production. That is why some cement plants, like UltraTech, have a coal power plant nearby to have their own source of fly ash while helping supplement the power grid.

UltraTech’s Awarpur Cement Works plant in western India needed a cost-effective way to link its SCADA system with the Chandrapur Super Thermal Power Station, a coal power plant approximately 30 kilometers away.

“The application demanded high bandwidth due to the distance,” said Aarti Shinde, an engineer with Sheetal Wireless, the systems integrator. “We’ve been using ProSoft Technology’s 802.11 a, b and g radios for many applications, so we knew they were reliable.”

They just needed to get the antennas high enough to establish a good line-of-sight connection to traverse the 30 kilometers. They elected to mount the antennas on the existing silos, or cement storage containers. It was perfect.

A total of four ProSoft radios were installed.

ProSoft’s technical support service was also a reason why Sheetal Wireless was pleased with the radios.